Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship (6 page)

“If you say so,” he murmured, sitting back against the edge of the table.

“You’d better go double-check on C and D Companies. They’ll need supplies sent down the line in another forty-three minutes, after the shooting and screaming have stopped,” she told him, leaning close enough to be heard without speaking over the new song. “Commander Harper was going to give your supply sergeants a list of what they’ll need, but you’ll still need to sign off on them as cross-Company requisitions.

“Use our budget authorizations, not your own. Master Sergeant Sadneczek should have included the codes for it in Harper’s paperwork—oh, and don’t forget the Salik will be shooting at us, too, shortly. You have about eight minutes, plenty of time to sign papers and redistribute the troops who haven’t budged at Commander Harper’s suggestion,” she added. “Particularly Privates Ving and Hassan, and Lance Corporal von Mitt. The attack will be over after the seventh strike, then we can all clean up and get some rest.”

Eyeing her one last time, Roghetti shook his head and rose without a word. Pulling up the hood on his poncho, he left the mess tent just as Clairmont reached the chorus of his next composition about his commanding officer.

Ia, Bloody Mary!

Place your body between your beloved home,

And the war’s desolation . . .

The contents of her mug had finally lost heat. Ia sipped at the tepid caf’ anyway. She had two more hours to stay awake before things would be calm enough for her to catch any sleep.

Who? Oh God . . . Brigadier General José Mattox. Oh yes,
that
name brings up some memories, doesn’t it?

~Ia

“Captain—Ship’s Captain Ia,” Captain Roghetti corrected himself. Lengthening his strides, the camouflage-clad man caught up with her as she emerged from one of the spokes of the tent-and-pod structures comprising his Company’s base camp. “Is there a particular reason why . . . Wait,” he muttered, frowning between her and the direction she was headed. “So you
do
already know about the civilians insisting on seeing you in person at the perimeter?”

“Of course. Before I hit the cot last night, I ducked back into central command and asked my comm tech to make a few calls,” Ia explained. “Those civilians are bringing me something I purchased and had stashed on this planet months ago.”

She nodded at the gravel road that led away from the heart of the camp. In the light of local morning—though it was early evening Terran Standard time—it was easy to see that Roghetti had set up E Company’s base camp in some farmer’s unplowed fields. The local ground cover was a sort of reddish brown color and plush like moss. The mud was yellowish, and the gravel used to keep the landowner’s tractorbots from bogging down in that mud formed a ribbon of pinkish granite chips.

It snaked toward the brownish tree-equivalents bordering the camp, leaving Ia with the impression the landscape was the wrong color. She kept expecting the ground to have brown mud and bluish grass-stuff, not reddish brown and yellow. Even her own clothes looked a little weird since she kept expecting to see gray at the edge of her vision, not camouflaged yellow-brown-red, though she knew she’d be wearing them for the next sixty-three local days.

Chaplain Benjamin and Commander Harper had not only carried her belongings off the
Hellfire
, they had ensured the local Army equipment manufactories issued suitable camouflage clothing and equipment in her specific sizes. The only differences between her uniform and Roghetti’s were the rocket-clutching brass eagles she wore on her shirt points and the fact that the outer edges of her sleeves and pant legs had a little streaking and sprinkling of neutral gray randomly seeded through the camouflage patterning, whereas his held hints of dull green.

Striding at her side, Roghetti followed her in silence, his gaze sweeping over the fields with their lumps of tents, container pods, hangars, and handful of vehicles in sight. The rain had quit at some point while she slept, and the ground was misting a little, the air cool but supersaturated with moisture. It wouldn’t last long, she knew. Within the hour, water would be falling again. They were on the verge of full spring, locally, and that meant plenty of showers.

Roghetti finished his inspection and glanced at her again. “So, are you going to tell me what you’re going to insist on letting in past my perimeter?”

“I’ll not only tell you, I’ll even let you use it,” Ia promised. She tipped her head at the tunnel of the gravel road leading into the forest. “I directed the Afaso Order to purchase a portable hyperrelay unit and mount it in a hovervan for my use.”

“You have a big enough budget to buy a portable hyperrelay?” he asked her, dark brows quirking under the bill of his cap. “Not to mention, last I checked, the Afaso were still nonmilitant, civilian-sector, monastic practical pacifists. Hardly the type to take orders from the Space Force.”

“They’re not. They’re taking orders from the Prophet of a Thousand Years. And my operating budget was big enough to slag the single most sophisticated, expensive ship currently in the fleet after only two and a half years of operating it,” Ia said.

The Army captain choked. Coughing, he cleared his throat. “You what?” he rasped. “What’d you do, blow up a capital ship? Is that what your ship was? But that can’t be right. You said your entire crew is only 160 and you,” Roghetti protested. “Capital ships require crews of several thousand.”

“It was hardly a capital ship, Captain,” Ia said. “The new Harasser Class is approximately the size of a frigate, with a normal crew complement of around five hundred. However, it hits with the firepower of somewhere between a battlecruiser and a battleship. The only problem was, I couldn’t spare that many people to be on my crew. Too many were and are still needed elsewhere in this war. So I pared it down to the absolute minimum, with a pool of about twenty replacements available.”

“Replacements?” he asked, confused.

She flicked her hand. “Nobodies. Talented, skillful, dedicated nobodies. People whose lives wouldn’t make a single impact anywhere else, positive or negative, in the flow of time. At least, for the most part. They’d never make an impact anywhere else, but in
my
Company, Captain, they can, have, and will change the course of the future. For the better, if I have anything to say about it.”

“You call them replacements, as if you
expect
your people to die,” he observed dryly.

Ia stopped walking. Roghetti stopped a couple paces after her, turning to face her.

“We all die in the end, Luca,” she said quietly, addressing him by his given name. “I am as mortal as you, or Private York, or your supply sergeants, or . . . or just about any Human out there. I can predict how to avoid death, and I can
tell
people how to avoid death . . . but that doesn’t mean they’ll follow through. And it definitely does not mean they’ll succeed in avoiding it even if they do follow through.
Every
officer knows that the men and women under his or her command may die at some point.

“I’ve been lucky that, up until now, my crew has stayed mostly aboard our ship. I’ve been able to pilot it safely through every life-threatening engagement we’ve faced,” she added, striding forward again. He turned to join her as she moved. “But now we’re on the ground, we will have to scatter ourselves across a wide stretch of terrain, and we will face a very large number of the enemy. I can single-handedly control the flight of a starship less than a kilometer long. I cannot control a thousand kilometers of enemy-infested terrain.”

They had reached the tree line. The perimeter checkpoint was another two hundred meters down the way. Such a large camp would have been difficult for her crew to have patrolled even with the use of surveillance equipment, but then Ia only had three Platoons, plus a small cadre. Roghetti commanded five Platoons of six Squads each and a full cadre, including Squad-level sergeants, supply officers, and so forth. The TUPSF Army could afford to be more support-heavy than the trimmed-down needs of the Marines, and when she had served in the Navy, Ia’s support had been whatever Battle Platforms her small Delta-VX had touched.

Since neither she nor the captain strolling at her side were bothering to hide their approach, the sentries flanking the gate had plenty of time to identify them. One soldier, she could see openly; he gently cradled his stunner rifle as he stood by the fence gate, its bulbous black-and-white curves painted over in the local camouflage colors. She only knew the other soldier’s location from the timestreams, for the woman had taken that much care to blend in with her surroundings.

Beyond the gate sat a beige hovervan. Next to it parked a hoverbike. Both sets of thrusters had been turned off, leaving them parked on their landing pods. Leaning against the front bumper of the van were a pair of batik-clad Human males.

One was dark-skinned, rather short, and boasted whipcord muscles, visible thanks to his sleeveless tunic. The other was about as tall as Ia, pale and freckled, but built like a brick door. Not quite as broad as Ia’s brother Thorne, but meaty all the same. Both had their hair shorn close to their heads in buzz cuts that would have done any Space Force soldier proud, straight out of Basic.

The private at the gate nodded to them. “Captain, sir,” he greeted Roghetti, then glanced at Ia. “Lieutenant Colonel.”

“Ship’s Captain,” Roghetti corrected, lifting his chin at Ia. Or rather, at her collar points. “That eagle has a rocket. Navy insignia and rank, not Army.”

“Sorry, sir.
Ship’s
Captain, sir,” the private corrected himself. The name patch above his shirt pocket read
Gulvigsson
. Like the two Afaso, he was stocky and muscular, bred for heavyworlder life, with pale skin and dark lashes.

“It’s alright. Captain, would you like to inspect the van before permitting it into camp?” Ia offered politely.

Roghetti eyed it, her, the Afaso, then her again. “Will you vouch for it?”

Focusing her attention inward, down, and out in a peculiar mental flip, Ia checked the timestreams. Not to trace the future of the van—since she had plans for it—but to check its past. What took her a couple minutes within the expanse of her mind only took a second or two in reality. Nodding, she lifted her chin. “It’s clean. Nothing’s been tampered with.”

“That’s it?” Captain Roghetti asked her. “You just roll up your eyes for a moment, and that’s it? You just know?”

“I’ve learned to be both very fast and very thorough at checking the past and future. That, and they are who they appear to be: vowed monks from the Eltegar City Dojo. Full Master Mark Saunders,” Ia introduced. The shorter man gave them a short bow at her gesture, and the taller nodded. “And Senior Master Brian Apowain. Good morning, gentlemeioas. Thank you for bringing this out here.”

The taller man bowed to her as his partner sagged back against the hovervan once more. Apowain fished a set of keys from the pocket of his wax-resist dyed trousers. The patterns on his clothes echoed the frilly leaves of the local Dabin-style trees, as was the usual custom for local monk batiks. “Good morning, Prophet. I believe these are now yours.”

He tossed the starter keys, a pair of black plexi rods connected by a ring, toward Ia. The high arc of it curved and fell faster than it would have back on Earth, thanks to Dabin’s higher gravity, but it did clear the tall fence. Lifting her hand, Ia pulled the keys out of their arc telekinetically, slowing and wafting them into her grip. “Thank you. Return to the city and prepare to carry out the defense plans I sent to you. Remember to wait for the signal, and match it to the right plans before executing. Do not engage the enemy unless you absolutely have to.”

Saunders smirked, pushing away from the van so he could saunter over to the hoverbike. “We’re not that stupid. No offense to you Army types.”

“. . . None taken,” Roghetti muttered, watching both monks mount the hoverbike. “Open the gate for the Ship’s Captain.”

Gulvigsson nodded and touched something on his arm unit. Static sparked not just across the gate but across the air for at least four meters above the gate, proving that the perimeter had been secured by more than just a mesh of cheap-looking, galvanized, chain-link steel. Saunders turned on the thrusters. With a quiet
thrum
, the hoverbike lifted up off the ground, then tipped sideways and took off. Ia stepped through the gate in their wake.

“I’ll give you a ride back to camp if you want, Captain,” she offered, unlocking the beige vehicle.

“I’ll take that offer.” Joining her, he climbed into the hovervan from the other side, then craned his neck to eye the machinery occupying most of the back. “You said I could use it?”

“My people will have priority, but yes. First thing’s first. Get this back to camp and get my comm techs to start tuning its frequencies—buckle up,” she ordered, strapping herself into the restraint harness. “It might be less than a klick back to the heart of camp, but this thing won’t move until I hear that belt click.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” he quipped, pulling the straps into place for his own seat. “How long will it take to get the frequencies tuned? I have some reports I need to send to the DoI, and I’d prefer to send ’em by a more private means than lightwave.”

“Probably about two, three hours. No more than three, most likely. Then I’ll need half an hour to connect with Headquarters and give Mattox my battle plans.” Starting the thrusters, Ia lifted the hovervan a meter off the ground and drifted it forward, navigating the gate gently to keep from knocking Gulvigsson’s legs out from under him with the repulsor fields. She sped up a little once they were through. “We have twelve cable plugs for direct-line bandwidths available, with the capacity to project up to four pinholes at a time with this rig. But it has to be sitting still. The vacuum chamber is too small to compensate for anything more than the planet’s own movement. You can have up to four of those twelve bandwidths if you know the exact connection frequencies.”

“Not really, since we deal mostly in lightwave frequencies out here on the line . . . but I figure
you
might know. If your crew is right, and you really
are
that accurate,” Roghetti added, glancing at her.

Ia shrugged. “I try to be. A lot more than I care to think about is riding every single day on my accuracy.”

 • • • 

“Shakk,”
Captain Roghetti swore, staring at the screen on the back of the hyperrelay unit.

“. . . Sir?” Private Mysuri asked, glancing between him and her CO. “Is something wrong?” It was her duty-shift hour to watch the van’s contents, and her responsibility to make sure everything worked properly now that the hyperrelay had been programmed.

“It’s alright, Private,” Ia reassured her. “He’s just realized he now has a direct connection to the Tower’s hyperrelay hub on Earth.”

“That explains why the machine is humming so loudly,” Roghetti muttered, nodding at the thrumming bulk of white metal occupying the van’s cargo space. He hesitated, datachip in hand, then shook his head. “I can’t send this right now. I was thinking I’d get the DoI processing center on
Kelkirk
Station, which is where the Dabin relays connect.”

Ia frowned in confusion. She trailed mental fingers through the timestreams, looking for what he wanted to send, and its potential repercussions. “. . . Ah. That report. Yeah, it’ll get flagged for priority handling, coming in on this particular channel. You should probably speak with Colonel Matheson and Major Nikulu’a before you send it, double-confirm they’ll be sending their own. Maybe even invite them out here to help file it in person.”